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We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

And they're here to make money. There seems to be a large market for people who want pretty appliances with certain "limitations" that work painlessly. Limitations is in quotes because it's a limit to myself and many on Slashdot, but not to most casual users.

CWmike writes "A new and improved botnet that has infected more than four million PCs is 'practically indestructible,' security researchers say. TDL-4, the name for both the bot Trojan that infects machines and the ensuing collection of compromised computers, is 'the most sophisticated threat today,' said Kaspersky Labs researcher Sergey Golovanov in a detailed analysis on Monday. Others agree. 'I wouldn't say it's perfectly indestructible, but it is pretty much indestructible,' Joe Stewart, director of malware research at Dell SecureWorks and an internationally-known botnet expert, told Computerworld on Wednesday. 'It does a very good job of maintaining itself.' Because TDL-4 installs its rootkit on the MBR, it is invisible to both the operating system and more, importantly, security software designed to sniff out malicious code. But that's not TDL-4's secret weapon. What makes the botnet indestructible is the combination of its advanced encryption and the use of a public peer-to-peer (P2P) network for the instructions issued to the malware by command-and-control (C&C) servers. 'The way peer-to-peer is used for TDL-4 will make it extremely hard to take down this botnet,' said Roel Schouwenberg, senior malware researcher at Kaspersky. 'The TDL guys are doing their utmost not to become the next gang to lose their botnet.'"

ianare writes "Federal budget cuts are threatening to leave the US without some critical satellites, and that could mean less accurate warnings about events like tornadoes and blizzards. In particular, officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are concerned about satellites that orbit over the earth's poles rather than remaining over a fixed spot along the equator. These satellites are 'the backbone' of any forecast beyond a couple of days, says Kathryn Sullivan, assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction, and NOAA's deputy administrator. It was data from polar satellites that alerted forecasters to the risk of tornadoes in Alabama and Mississippi back in April, Sullivan says. 'With the polar satellites currently in place we were able to give those communities five days' heads up,' she says."

"It's reasonably trivial to remove MacDefender," said Wisniewski, using the name for a growing family of scareware. "It's not burying itself in the system, not compared to some of some of the crap that we see on Windows."

So the "no malware/virus on Mac" has now changed to "We have malware, but it's better than the ones on Windows"? Wonder what the defence would be when they inevitably start getting more complicated.

hairyfeet writes "After releasing Monotouch for iPhone which allows c# development on iOS, Novell has announced the availability of Mono for Android. Will this give us the 'one language to rule them all' that Java failed to bring, or will the bad blood between the F/OSS groups and Microsoft make this a dead end?"

If in your impossible and rather ridiculous example the UK military started bombing cities one by one, I don't see any problem with UN going in to prevent slaughter. Why do you think that situation is any different?!

They are stepping in to help overthrow Gadhafi. Regardless of whether you like him or not; regardless of whether you are happy with his rule in Libya, he holds that position of power, and you cannot apply your own constitution to overthrow his.

I highly doubt Libyan constitution condones a genocidal maniac mass murdering Libyan people. Nobody's constitution is being applied here, at least I didn't here one being referred to during the security council proceedings.

There are days when I hate being a westerner.

This wasn't even unilateral action by the west. The Arab league has already supported a no fly zone and even two of its members will participate in implementing it. Couple of countries attacking Iraq by making up evidence is a shameful act. International community intervening in Libya to prevent mass murder is legitimate and proud act. Should be pretty easy to tell the two apart.

akgraner writes "When Canonical made the decision to make Unity the default desktop, some questioned the GNOME/Canonical relationship. Adding fuel to this fire was the recent distribution split of revenue generated by Banshee. These decisions caused the Ubuntu, GNOME and even Fedora community members to ask why these things were done. In Dave Neary's 'Has GNOME rejected Canonical help?' post, he states, 'I have repeatedly read Canonical & Ubuntu people say, "We offered our help to GNOME, and they didn't want it."' Neary gives examples in his post of what others have said to back up the 'they didn't want it' claim by Canonical and Ubuntu people. Today, though, Shuttleworth responds on his blog. 'Competition is tough on the contestants, but it gets great results for everyone else.'"

An anonymous reader writes "You know it's coming, and for the forever-alone crowd, not soon enough: robots that physically interact with humans. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found in a study that people generally had a positive response toward being touched by a benevolent robotic nurse, but that their perception of the robot's intent made a significant difference. 'Even though the robot touched people in the same way,' said a team lead, 'if people thought the robot was doing that to clean them, versus doing that to comfort them, it made a significant difference in ... whether they found that contact favorable or not.'"

An anonymous reader writes "There's been yet another mega-leak, this time of 1,600 papers describing the Israeli/Palestinian peace process negotiations. It's independent of Wikileaks and came to light via al-Jazeera, showing perhaps that the mega-leak meme is here to stay whatever happens to Assange. The papers show a weak Palestinian side offering ever greater concessions to Israel, which flatly rejected this as being insufficient: 'We do not like this suggestion because it does not meet our demands,' Israel's then foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, told the Palestinians, 'and probably it was not easy for you to think about it, but I really appreciate it.'"

mudimba writes "Microsoft has made grand announcements about how great their implementation of the HTML5 canvas specification is. However, while I was porting a large HTML5 application to work with IE9 beta I found that there are some key features missing. Workarounds are provided where possible. (Disclaimer: I am the author of the submitted article.)"